Huawei’s New Facial Recognition App “Turns Emotions Into Sounds”

Huawei’s been in the news a fair amount regularly, what with the company seemingly one of the factors behind Apple’s recently announced sales slump and their CFO being at the center of a legal/trade war tussle involving Canada and the US. But setting aside the security concerns that led to the latter story for a moment, the creativity and technology that contributed to the former remain impressive (even if whoever runs their social media seems to prefer using an iPhone).

The latest case in point: a new AI-powered app that turns “emotions” into sounds for the visually impaired.

developed in collaboration with the polish blind association and a key group of the blind community who were involved in every step of the process, the application uses the back cameras to scan the face of the person with whom the blind person is talking. AI then processes the identified emotion into a defined sound heard on the phone (or in the earphone the person is wearing), all in a real time and in offline mode

The app, called Facing Emotions, has mostly been rolled out in Europe so far. Here’s an advert from Huawei’s Swedish marketing branch (but with English commentary) that explains a bit more about it all: